TA wrote:Thad wrote:pacobird wrote:Reminder: Anthony Kennedy sucks, has always sucked, was always going to retire during a GOP presidency, and we're better off without him.
Yeah, true. I'm very worried that we're going to get somebody even worse, but that would have been just as true if he'd retired under Bush. Disgusting as Gorsuch is, he's not that far from Alito.
Worse?
On Monday, Kennedy joined the conservative majority in granting free reign to wildly racist gerrymandering. He also joined the majority in making anti-trust legislation impossible to enforce in any market that exists as a platform, unless you show that all sides are being harmed by anti-competitive actions, which means just impossible to enforce. On Tuesday, Kennedy joined the conservative majority in overturning Korematsu and claiming that Japanese internment camps were in fact constitutional and okay. On Wednesday, Kennedy joined the conservative majority in overturning 40 years of precedent to obliterate public-sector unions. Last Friday, he authored the dissent in a 5-4 decision that would have let the government pull historical location data from cellphones without a warrant if Roberts hadn't inexplicably joined the four liberal judges to write that cellphones were more like a GPS than a phone in this one regard and needed a different precedent applied. And that's just in the past seven days.
We're going to go from a litany of 5-4 garbage decisions to a litany of 5-4 garbage decisions. Kennedy is trash, and has never been anything but.
Well, we're going to go from a litany of 5-4 garbage decisions with an occasional bone thrown toward gay rights and reproductive rights to a litany of 5-4 garbage decisions
without an occasional bone thrown toward gay rights or reproductive rights. If you don't think there's any way for things to get worse, well, I never figured you for an optimist.
Yes, I think there are worse justices than Kennedy. In fact, I think there are at least three serving on the court
right now. And that's if I give Roberts a
lot of benefit of the doubt and a
lot of credit for not killing the ACA when he had the chance.
This is not intended as a defense of Kennedy. (Or Roberts, for that matter.) Here, let me try an analogy.
The past week, I've been taking care of my sister-in-law's pets.
Her cats are assholes. Every time I show up to clean up after them, one of them has just taken a big shit in the litterbox and not buried it. There's even one of them who likes to wait
until I go to scoop the litterbox, then jumps in, takes a shit, and then spends several minutes cleaning his claws
without burying his shit first.
But yesterday, one of them had also had diarrhea. There were several large, dried puddles on the floor.
If you look at a fresh, unburied pile of cat shit in a litterbox and say "Well, cat shit doesn't get any worse than this," you're wrong.
And if you look at a fresh, unburied pile of cat shit in a litterbox, and compare it to the dried puddles of diarrhea, and say, "Man, those dried puddles of diarrhea in the middle of the floor are even worse than the fresh unburied cat shit in the litterbox," you are not praising the fresh unburied cat shit in the litterbox.
I'm aware that Kennedy is a piece of shit, thanks. But I stand by my contention that some pieces of shit are worse than others.